Reagan pioneered the model of cutting public funding to higher education and he had reduced tuition to what had previously been a nearly free state university. So several universities were in fact free. many of the state ones were until his his time. Uh he criticized the University of California system for being too free uh for harboring leftist activists and his policies began the long-term transformation of public universities uh from the public goods to a consumer commodity. So Reagan's administration embraced free market anti-government intervention policies which reduced federal spending in many areas including education. The underlying idea was that individuals not states should bear the cost of their own education since they were the ones who benefited from it personally.

So what's interesting is that both sides Democrats/Republicans during this period eroded the spiritual essence of the humanities, spiritual nourishment, human flourishing. These are things that are very hard to commodify and it's also hard to weaponize for the political reform that the left wanted. So both extremes of the political spectrum lost interest in the humanities. Both sides now risk forgetting that the humanities exist to form human beings, not just money makers and activists to cultivate imagination, empathy, wisdom, and moral discernment, and to help people find meaning and beauty in life. Isn't that what it's all about? I can't think of a better reason for the humanities to exist.

From the left, many uh humanities disciplines have turned from studying the true, the beautiful, the good to analyze structures of power and promote a kind of scholarship that was really just the political activism.

Studies actually show that the negative effects of smartphones are disproportionately hurting people of lower income households where quiet spaces and are scarce and abuse, anxiety, and depression are more common. So, of course you're going to be seeking escape in any way you can, not in books but in smartphones.

I’m currently reading the letters of Ficino. He was an Italian Renaissance translator who introduced the writings of Plato, Neoplatonism, and the Hermetic texts to the Latin West at a time when the universities were corrupted and embroiled in their own tedious debates.

His model—the Florentine Academy, which was essentially a highly glorified study group (though an amazing one)—helped initiate the revival of learning during the Renaissance. In fact, the state of universities right before the Renaissance, in Ficino’s time, resembles our own in some ways.

Medieval universities across Europe were locked in Aristotelian, scholastic, logic-chopping debates. The major universities of Paris, Padua, Oxford, and others were dominated by a form of stale scholasticism. This tradition focused on commentaries and reconciling Aristotelian philosophy with Christianity, primarily through the work of Thomas Aquinas—who was actually brilliant—but by this point, things had grown stagnant. So by the 14th century, Aristotelian logic and the commentaries of Aquinas were dominating the university faculties.

Nearly every renaissance has begun either under the conditions of collapse or shortly after some kind of cultural exhaustion and the loss of meaning.